Personnel cuts at Portland Center Stage include Mead Hunter

Literary manager Mead Hunter's position was among those cut from Portland Center Stage on Monday. The portrait, by Gwen Seemel, is from his blog.

Note: This post has been updated as of 2:40 p.m. to reflect comments by Mead Hunter and Trisha Pancio of Portland Center Stage.

The news out of Portland Center Stage yesterday afternoon was not good. The company eliminated 4.5 positions from its box office and IT operations, along with its literary management department. That brings the total number of layoffs at the company since its season began in September, to around 15.

And that means that Mead Hunter, who has been at the company for seven years, and Megan Ward are no longer on staff at Center Stage.

Hunter is at the center of many important activities at the company, including new play development, which we wrote about in January. Hunter and Ward work on the JAW new-play festival each year, and Hunter is the prime contact at the theater for national-caliber playwrights

But as Trisha Pancio, the public relations and publications manager of the company wrote, the overall "insight, intelligence and diplomacy that Mead brought to our work environment" is likely to be missed even more than his participation in the selection of plays at the company.

Hunter's departure indicates that the summer JAW festival is at risk. He said that he's hoping to continue working on this year's festival on a volunteer basis, having helped whittle the festival's many submissions down to a "long short-list" already. Now the company is trying to figure out how much money will be available to produce the many workshops in the festival and how to get things done with a "skeletal" staff.

Hunter says The PlayGroup, a group he created to assist and encourage local playwrights, will be changing. It may become a producing organization of some sort. He said details would be announced soon, though his role in the new group will be advisory. Hunter's other duties will fall on Rose Reardon, associate artistic director, and Kelsey Tyler, the education director, according to Pancio. Hunter said that he was told that the company was open to the idea of bringing him back when financial conditions improve and that he hoped to work with the theater on a contract basis in the future.

Hunter's website suggests that "disastrous budgeting miscalculations paired with the moribund global economy" led to the cuts. And it says that he'll be devoting more attention to his new editorial services business, SuperScript, which he started in January. Hunter explained that the budget miscalculations were recession related, as expected revenue did not materialize. And even though the company is on the way to attracting its second-largest audience ever, more and more of that audience is taking advantage of rush and other discounted tickets. That means that the company isn't meeting budget projections at the box-office even though the number of people seeing the shows is up for the year.

Megan Ward has also posted about things on her blog. And the comments section of Hunter's post on his website give a good indication of how the theater community feels about him and his contribution to life on stage in Portland.